Velocity Mobile Velocity 103 review

A newcomer to the mobile phone market leaves us pleasantly surprised

Our Verdict

A well specced and pleasantly simple device. This could be one newcomer to watch

For

Robust and reliable design

Simple and easy to use

VOTA could come in handy

Against

Basic camera

Lacklustre battery life

There are lots of smartphones competing for your attention and a new name has just arrived: Velocity Mobile.

The company's aim is to make minimalist-looking hardware with solid features for a good price, and to do something about the boring Windows Mobile look and feel.

The Velocity 103 is the first launch in the UK. It has a black fascia, two front buttons for Call and End functions, and a white track-wheel. Its 640 x 480 high res, ﬂush to casing, screen was ideally sensitive to our tapping.

There are plenty of features, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, quad-band GSM with HSDPA to 7.2Mbps, video calling camera and GPS. Velocity's main selling points though are Odyssey and VOTA.

Neat interface

Odyssey is the front end to Windows Mobile. It provides a neat overlay that is like HTC's TouchFLO in looks and ﬁnger-dragging operation to gain attention, but different enough so it doesn't feel like a complete copy.

VOTA is Velocity Over The Air. This will deliver updates, including OS tweaks and new applications on a regular basis. This could be great for continuously refreshing your device, but there are problems.

The headset connector is 2.5mm rather than 3.5mm, the camera shoots at just 2 megapixels and has no auto-focus and no ﬂash.

Battery life is reasonable for a Windows Mobile device. Under intensive use, daily top-ups may be required, however.